Halifax Health, as a publicly owned hospital, has a responsibility to wisely steward its taxpayer funding. That is why we were troubled when we learned of its plans to build a freestanding emergency room and a new hospital in Deltona, 25 miles outside of its tax district in East Volusia. Now, we are troubled to learn that the hospital will be even larger than previously reported.

While we support state-of-the-art health care and job creation in our community, this project is unnecessary and represents a significant problem in the way our local tax system is structured. If Halifax feels that additional healthcare facilities are needed, they should be located in the district that funds them. Deltona is already well served by several facilities.

We note that Halifax leadership was quoted in the News Journal article saying, "It's not an attempt for us to use public tax dollars outside of the district." Taxpayers are tired of these sorts of arguments because we know that money supporting one side of an enterprise only helps the other.The bottom line is that the taxpayers of this hospital district should not be helping subsidize an expansion into another region.

Volusia Tax Reform's mission is to fight wasteful spending and reduce the tax burden on home and business owners in Volusia County. Halifax Health's project is just the type of unwise, unnecessary, and unfair use of taxpayer dollars that we were founded ten years ago to stop, and we intend to work toward that goal.